I recently re-designed a website for a company we do a lot of work for: Toadily Fun. Toadily Fun is a play center for children and adults similar to a Chuck E. Cheese. We designed their logo, building sign, and their first website last summer. A year later both Christina (the owner) and myself mutually agreed that it would be very effecient if we could design her a new site that she could edit and update her self.

The problem is the software I use to design and edit sites is neither cheap nor intuitive, so up until now I have had no solution for people that wanted full control over their sites after the initial design. I have recenly spent a lot of time with blogger, a free google browser based application that allows you to... ahem... blog (what I am using right now to tell you about this). It occured to me that I could design a blog site for Christina, and instead of pages she would have categories.

The nice thing about blogger is it is really easy to use from a posting stand point. From a desiging stand point, it can be very tricky and code-indusive to customize the overall look of the blog. Typically I start out with a free, pre-designed blogger template (as in this case) then edit every single element of the template to create a new design that fits the look and functionality I am looking for.

So far Christina seems to be enjoying doing all of her own posting and editing, and being the first client I have done this for I am making her my guinea pig so that I can perfect this style of web design and market it to more people.

The site we created last year: Toadily Fun designed in Dreamweaver
The new 'client-edit-friendly version: Toadily Fun modified in Blogger